


places no picture contains

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/F, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the middle that really counts.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecivilunrest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecivilunrest/gifts).



> 12 Days of Ficmas: Day 6.  
> thecivilunrest requested: "Zatanna/Raquel, anything you want"

This is how it happens: 

Zatanna is crying about her dad because she’s coming back from seeing  _Simon Boccagnera_  and that had always been their favorite, an opera about a father dying in his daughter’s arms, and she can’t see enough to walk on the sidewalk through her tears so she pulls out her cell phone and dials a number.  
  
“Hot date walk out on ya?” Raquel quips without preamble. Zatanna can almost sense her skin against the receiver, pressing the phone to her ear with her shoulder.  
  
“I went by myself,” she says, not bothering to conceal the tears in her throat.   
  
“Whoa, whoa.” She hears a thump – Raquel’s just set something down. “Why’re you crying?”   
  
“I just…” Zatanna stops in the middle of the street, in her mother’s old black dress with the three-quarter sleeves and the butterfly neck, in her black high heels and her black stockings and her white trench coat. “Is it – am I past the point where I’m allowed to be missing my dad?”   
  
“Nah, never,” Raquel replies immediately. “Hey, listen. Come over. I’ve got some spaghetti left over. And they’re showing  _The Bandwagon_  on TCM, and I hate it, but you love it, so come.”  
  
Zatanna doesn’t even have to think. She smiles a little, shakily, and wipes a flake of falling snow from her hair as she walks toward the Happy Harbor zeta tube. “Okay.”   
  
Raquel’s apartment is small but it’s homey. The floor is all hardwood but there are enough throw rugs there to cover it all up, shaggy and worn and faded shades of purple and pink. They eat cold spaghetti and watch Fred Astaire dance with Cyd Charise and Raquel says that Zatanna looks just like her, and Zatanna kisses her.   
  
She tastes just the same, like pomegranates (and tomato sauce). She pulls Zatanna into her and paints her lipstick with her mouth, and Zatanna holds her too tightly and they fall asleep entwined without a blanket, and Zatanna dreams everything in slow motion.   
  


 

 

  
  
This is how it begins:   
  
“Y’know, you’re really gorgeous,” Raquel says when they’re both sixteen, while Zatanna pulls her hair up to cook.  
  
Zatanna freezes and stares at her, wide blue eyes and flushed cheeks, and Raquel shrugs like she’s bored.  
  
“What?” she asks plainly, and Zatanna sees her differently right then as though the sun is shining on her from behind, untidy black hair and dimples when she smirks and a dip in her collarbone to fit a kiss. “Somebody had to say it.”   
  


 

 

  
  
This is how it starts:  
  
It’s Raquel first. Always Raquel first, because Zatanna likes to save being brave for when she really needs it, when it will really make her father proud.   
  
They brush shoulders a lot. Raquel holds her hand on the bioship once when nobody’s looking. They bump and breeze and press their backs to one another’s during fights and they move together like a clock when it counts, and Zatanna has memorized what she smells like. They have embraced and held onto each other for too long, and they have whispered in each other’s ears, but they have never touched mouths.   
  
Zatanna has just graduated from high school and her eighteenth birthday was yesterday. The Team had come to the ceremony, cheering and whooping obnoxiously when she’d taken her diploma ( _magna cum laude_ , a golden sash around her gown). There had been a party for the birthday part of it all, streamers and Wally dragging out Apples to Apples and Dick kissing her on the cheek.  
  
But none of that’s important. Everyone’s gone now, except for her and Raquel, sitting on the couch and splitting the last cupcake. It’s the first time Zatanna has seen Raquel in a dress (pink, and simple), all legs and muscles and smooth skin.   
  
“Can I ask you something?” Raquel inquires casually.   
  
Zatanna swallows the last of the chocolate, wiping it from her mouth with the back of her hand.  
  
“Yeah, sure,” she says, turning her head. Her hair is cropped close to her chin in an always-immaculate bob, and it swings when she moves.  
  
“What’s the story with you and Dick?”   
  
Zatanna blinks, her eyebrows going high. Raquel is keeping her eyes trained on the coffee table.  
  
“Um, well, we…” Zatanna bites her lip. “You know what our deal is; you’re practically the only one who  _does_.”  
  
“No, but I mean, do you love him?” Raquel asks, not even blinking, her eyelids going low. Zatanna’s gaze drifts to that spot in her collarbone and she tries to keep her composure.   
  
“Do I what?” she evades.  
  
“Love him, idiot,” Raquel repeats with a scoff. “They taught you what that means at Gotham Prep, right?”   
  
“I…” Zatanna frowns, taken aback by the sudden coldness in the edges of Raquel’s eyes. “I don’t know. I love having him around.”  
  
“So you want him to stay,” Raquel murmurs, looking weary. “ _You_  want to stay.”  
  
“No,” Zatanna says, and Raquel looks taken aback, finally staring at her (a punch to the solar plexus). “I’ve told you all of this. It’s like he’s not even there, so how can I be?”   
  
“Yeah,” Raquel muses, her eyes straying inscrutably. She twiddles her fingers against the seat of the couch. “Dumbass.”   
  
“Me?” Zatanna exclaims.  
  
“Nah, him,” Raquel explains, waving her hand. “For not being there for you.  _Dumbass_.”   
  
“Um, hate to break it to you, but he  _is_  kind of, y’know, a mathlete,” Zatanna retorts jokingly, leaning back and smirking. “Being a dumbass isn’t  _exactly_  a trait they tend to have.”  
  
“Yeah, but, Zee, you don’t get it,” Raquel says firmly, and Zatanna’s smirk falls away as she turns her head slightly to study the back of Raquel’s head as she speaks. “Every time he kisses you, he’s lucky. And he wastes it.”  
  
She sighs quietly, long and low and everything she has in her.  
  
“I wanna be as lucky as that asshole,” she finishes, “once.”   
  
Something inside of Zatanna falls. It tumbles and plummets and it never hits her bottom, and when it is done, when it finally finishes, it pries her ribs apart one-by-one, and it heats her from the belly up, and it’s like there are stars coming from her fingertips. Like magic.   
  
“I don’t see why you can’t be,” she hears herself say, her cheeks lifting in the most mischievous smirk she’s probably ever had. “I mean, you can try your luck anytime.”   
  
“Wow,” Raquel says after a moment, tilting her head back over her shoulder and giving her a far softer smile than Zatanna had thought her capable of. “Cheeky.”   
  
“It’s part of my charm,” Zatanna says airily, and when Raquel kisses her, and when she tastes the pomegranate for the first time, she thinks of the callouses on her fingers in the bioship and she thinks of bandaging each other after battles and she thinks of every secret she’s dropped in Raquel’s patient hands, and she thinks of growing older and sharing a bed and she thinks of all the things she’d told herself to wait for.   
  


 

 

  
  
(This is the pause:  
  
Zatanna watches Raquel when she rockets through the night sky, a streak of pink glowing like the sun itself, and it moves her, and it ignites her, fizzling and fiery and unstoppable.   
  
It is magic.)  
  


 

 

  
  
(This is the spark:  
  
Raquel sees Zatanna’s eyes shine a shade of amber and it makes her breath hitch like a hook against her throat, and it’s enough to prompt her to unclasp Zatanna’s bra with one hand and kiss her neck and laugh, quietly, in the dark, with her.   
  
It is flight.)  
  


 

 

  
  
This is how it ends:   
  
“Hey, live with me,” Zatanna blurts out over breakfast, in nothing but a t-shirt, holding the carton of milk in one hand and the bowl of Froot Loops in the other.   
  
“I basically already do,” Raquel retorts without missing a beat, grinning at the recycled  _Calvin & Hobbes_ strip in the newspaper. “But we are  _not_  sleeping on the couch anymore. It’s freaking your cat out.”   
  
“Giovanni can handle it,” Zatanna insists, holding back the wide smile swelling in her very chest.   
  
“Not what you said last night,” Raquel quips, and Zatanna flicks a spoonful of milk at her while she pads by, bare feet and cereal smell.   
  
She realizes, then, exactly what it all means now: There will be enough last nights to turn the moon to mist, and still she will count them, and still the couch will suit their shapes, and still she will taste pomegranates – and eventually, she’ll learn to stop being so afraid.

 

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE TRY TO IGNORE THE MYSTERIOUS ABSENCE OF AMISTAD.


End file.
